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Stalks of wheat swayed gently in the wind, and the air smelled of warm, ripe grain. Insect chirped and buzzed in the grass. A narrow well-trodden path wound underfoot towards an invisible destination beyond the burning horizon. Like all memories, the landscape was stillborn, imperfect. The air would always smell of sun-kissed wheat; the rain-soaked dirt would squelch beneath her feet; the winding footpath would run on endlessly without a destination in sight.
Road peeked through a dimensional window she opened in the sky above the landscape. She still didn’t have enough strength to maintain her full form after the brief battle with Apocryphos in a dingy cell beneath the Order’s headquarters. It frustrated and terrified her to feel so powerless when the Earl and her family needed her; when Tyki needed her. The Earl needed her because he was trapped in the labyrinth of his memories, both man and clown and a supernatural being with a destiny to destroy worlds. Tyki needed her even more than a few months ago when the ache in his scars haunted him at night. But Road was trapped inside her shattered dreamworld, and her only company was less than ideal.
“I really need to see him. My idiot apprentice,” said her companion in a familiar irritated voice.
How many days went by in the real world without her watching the moon and stars to keep track of time? Could it be years?
“You should be sleeping,” Road replied fretfully. Her head bobbed up and down in the black nothingness. “When you’re not asleep, you’re a real downer. You know that?”
The man presently sat atop one of Road’s giftboxes with his legs crossed wearing a pair of loose black pants and a white shirt he didn’t fully buttoned up. He had grown out his flaming red hair, and his disheveled bangs fell into his eyes, concealing the eyepatch. A streak of light from the dimensional window illumined his face. He looked a tad too cocky for someone who took a bullet to the temple from his own gun. Jasdevi would find it amusing after that little rivalry they had with Tyki over who would get to kill him.
Cyrus von Cambpell, Cross Marian, Mana’s and Nea’s uncle, the elusive General of the Black Order. The man had many names and titles, and under each assumed name, he led a different life. He might have even believed that with each new life, he left the past behind him, but the past sorrows couldn’t be outrun or shooed off by assuming new names.
Road couldn’t begin to guess which man sat in front of her.
“Why am I here?” asked Cross.
Road shut the window into Nea’s memory. A ripple passed through the surrounding darkness like an echo from a whiff of wind. It smelled of warm wheat.
“Because I cannot connect my dreamscape and his,” she said. “But I can send you there. That’s how I told Allen to find that mansion. So, you’re useful to me.”
Allen was dangerous. She should have understood it sooner just how dangerous he was. Road remembered the landscape and the mansion, but it was not her sanctuary and she couldn’t enter it. It was Allen’s fault. Nea would have never stopped her from coming inside—
Cross’s words cut into her flow of thoughts.
“Am I a prisoner?”
“A prisoner? I liked you better when you were asleep.”
“It’s a simple question… Road.”
“You don’t remember how you ended up here?”
“I admit my last memories are a bit fuzzy.” Cross outstretched his arm towards her. “Can I have a cigarette? Might help with my memory loss.”
Road laughed as loudly as her current feeble form allowed her. “It’s a lame joke, Cross Marian. I’m disappointed. We’re both stuck here for the same reason. Apocryphos is back.”
“Ah. It explains why I remember being shot with my own gun. That bastard can manipulate Innocence.”
There was no malice in Cross’s voice. They talked like they weren’t old enemies, and maybe for a moment they were more akin to estranged family members who had experienced a painful realization that even close-knit families could one day break apart.
It was as close to a truce as they had come since Road ran into him at Mana’s circus and he taunted her with that cursed word.
“How did you end up trapped here?” Cross went on.
“I’ll help you find that mansion. Allen is headed there. You want that, right?”
“That reminds me… That bastard stole something from me. Something important,” Cross muttered under his breath. “In any case, what do you hope to gain from helping him, Road? After my idiot apprentice finally enters that mansion and learns the truth about the Holy War.”
“I’m just curious. What is Allen going to do when he gets there?”
“You’re a bad liar.” Cross glanced at her pointedly. “You care about him.”
“Do you care about him?” Road taunted her guest with a sly smile. “No, that’s not what I want to know. Who do you care about more? Maybe you’re sending both of them to their deaths.”
Road wanted to ask Cross about Nea, but it felt strangely inappropriate to say his name out loud.
*
“Why didn’t you kill my foolish apprentice?”
Cross was a nuisance. Road had to concentrate on healing herself instead of answering his silly questions.
“I didn’t intend to kill him.”
“You didn’t intend to kill him. You didn’t intend to let him live. You knew who he was. Yet, you did nothing. What do you want, Road?”
It hurt to breathe, to think, to dream. Road was alone for what felt like eons because darkness had swallowed time, and her mind couldn’t latch onto a single detail—a sound, a color, a speck of dust—to figure out what day it was. Time measured change, and where there was no change, time became but a maddening illusion.
Road saved Allen from Apocryphos’s wrath, and she ended up confined to the prison of her shattered dreamworld, but she didn’t intend to explain her motives to Cross. At times, they seemed like estranged family members instead of enemies, but Road suspected their truce was short-lived. Their paths briefly crossed before forking, twisting, and arriving at vastly different destinations.
When Nea was a little boy, he often sat on Cyrus’s lap, reading a book or playing with his golems. Cross was wracked with guilt over what happened between Nea and Mana. He couldn’t leave that memory from long ago just like Nea couldn’t leave the wheat field with the crooked white tree. Cross craved to fix everything, the tinkerer and sorcerer that he was. Road accepted that some things were twisted and broken beyond fixing, and some forces were too destructive to mess with. Her innocence was stripped from her like an old, tattered dress.
“Remember that time you shot Tyki?” she said acrimoniously.
“I thought he lost himself to the Noah inside of him. I thought I was doing him a favor.”
Cross was lying to her. It was a lie of omission and interdiction. Road caught herself wondering whether Allen had finally found the secret Ark portal in the Bookman’s hideout. It was the only way someone from outside could enter the mansion that was protected, like Nea’s memory, with magic, love and time.
“Got ’cha, Cross. I had no idea you were such a softie.”
Cross grumbled something in response, but Road couldn’t concentrate on his words. She felt overwhelming weakness which came and went like ebbs and tides in an ocean. She couldn’t maintain her physical form and had to disappear for a little while.
*
Wisely found her stranded in the night amid countless bright stars and pulled her out of the swirl of darkness.
“Tell me, Road. What’s he trying to accomplish?” Wisely begged her for answers, fighting the hatred embedded deep in his Noah memory.
Cross and Wisely turned to her for answers. Some truths lay hidden even from Wisely’s demonic eye in the underpinnings of the God’s creation. Nea was different from the rest of the Noah. Allen was dangerous. They stood at a crossroads, with the signs pointing left and right and straight ahead; and there was a hidden pathway going back to the origins of it all.
Road was a dream, fading. She didn’t have a body, but she had her memories and her Noah memory that transcended the trappings of flesh—
Road rests her palm on Tyki’s chest, splays out her fingers with long, sharp nails like thorns on a rose. There is a heart under white, silky fabric and warm skin. She feels the even rhythm of thumps and beats and pauses, a mesmerizing music. They are Noah—not quite human—but the heart beats the same in Tyki’s chest even if he does not love the same. There’s an irony trapped between the many bones of a ribcage and a spine, and it’s sweet like candy. No one appreciates that irony more than Road when they’re dancing alone on a balcony in darkness, and it’s late spring, and the air smells of roses and passing rain.
“Hey, Road,” Tyki whispers cheekily into her ear over a strand of her short hair stuck to his lips, “you look really cute tonight. Would it be so bad if we stayed at this party a little longer, eh?”
They dance like they kill, without losing breath—
“Cross!” Road said capriciously. “Where are you?”
Road needed a distraction, but Cross didn’t rush to her side to entertain her with a conversation. He was asleep and useless like the rest of them. Tyki was useless because he couldn’t reach her here, but it wasn’t his fault. He would have protected her if she let him.
“Wisely?” Road called out in a small voice, but no one answered her.
Road was alone in timelessness.
*
“Wakey, wakey,” Road said to Cross in her singsong voice. “It’s time to go to that mansion.”
She felt her arms and legs for the first time since Apocryphos banished her to the void even if the sensation lasted for a fleeting moment.
“You owe me,” she went on. “I saved you after Apocryphos’s attack. I kept you safe.”
“I thought it was the Earl,” mumbled Cross, groping round himself with his right hand.
He slept on a couch Road conjured up for him in her dreamworld. She doubted there was a comfortable couch in that place on the Ark where she had left his body. Cross was probably looking for a bottle of cheap booze. No such luxuries in her dreamworld.
“Can I at least change?” He pointed to his crumpled white shirt. “I think I’d know if my apprentice found that mansion in the real world.”
He looked awfully confident for a pale ghost sitting on couch by a giant striped giftbox with a pink ribbon bow.
“How would you know? Are you spying on Allen?” demanded Road.
“There is a secret portal Nea left at the Bookman’s hideout. It bypasses my barrier. I can sense when someone activates it.”
“And you’ll know when Allen goes through the portal?”
Cross shrugged his broad shoulders. “The timing is right.”
Despite being incorporeal, Road felt a surge of excitement. “Do you think we should hurry up to greet him?” Did Allen grow taller since she last saw him?
“No, wait. What are you planning to do?”
Road pressed a dainty forefinger to her lips. She felt her arms again. She hasn’t fully recovered yet, but she knew she would get her body back soon.
Some truths were so cruel they should stay buried forever. Their weight crushed the most dauntless of souls. Love was foolish and stubborn. If love cut deeply, it wasn’t by design but by mistake. If it didn't burn with a hopeless yearning to heal scars and ease the pain, it wasn't love. Road had been leading Allen down a path to a place where he would learn the painful truth which shaped the destiny that haunted him. Her decisions were dictated by a calculated necessity. Deep down, she knew that at the end of that road, Allen would face horrors that eclipsed the losses he had already survived. Even if Road cared about that boy on a whim, she didn’t protect Allen from Apocryphos to give him even a mirage of a happy ending.
Road would do anything to protect Tyki from discovering the truth. Love was foolish and blind and stubborn. She was fighting for a mirage of their happy ending even after her body had turned to dust.